Increasing your Flickr efficiency

As many of you probably know, I post a lot of photos on Flickr and when you start to use it a lot, you start to spent large amounts of time on it, since you have a lot of new photos by your contacts that you want to take a look at and you might also be spending a lot of time interacting with other users in the Flickr groups. This can suck up a lot of your time and while Flickr is already very easy to navigate, there are some things that could be better. For this there are some utilities that can make your life easier and your Flickr browsing easier/ more efficient. Today I want to focus on some Greasemonkey scripts that I have found very useful. If you don’t know what Greasemonkey is, it’s a Firefox extension that allows scripts to alter the way a website looks and/or behaves. If you are using Safari as your browser, you can try out GreaseKit, which allows you to run the with Safari but not all scripts work and none do with Safari 4 (at least non of mine).

Here are my favorite scripts:

Flickr Refer Comment – this script will automatically add a line of text at the end of your comment on a photo stating where you found the photo (e.g. your Flickr homepage, a group page, etc.). This won’t help you but is very helpful for the person you leave the comment. For other browsers you can find a little bookmarklet for doing the same thing by clicking here.

Flickr Rich Edit – this script will add little buttons to your comment box so that you can access bold, italic, link and quote with the click of a button instead of having to add the HTML code.

Flickr – Move commet form up – this script is one of my favorites – it will move the comment box under the photo instead of having it at the end of the page. This means that you won’t have to scroll down all the way to leave a comment. I tend to leave a lot more comments with this enabled.

Flickr Auto Page – another one of my favorites. This script eliminates the need to click on the next page link when you are viewing photos in Flickr, it will automatically load the next page beneath the current one in the same window/ on the same page. With this enabled I breeze through 10 pages of photos without even realizing it.

FlickrPM – this script will add several links/icons next to a username. These will allow you to access their photostream, their profile, their favorites etc. with the click of a button.

Flickr Buddy Icon Reply – this script is especially useful when you interact with a lot of users in the Flickr groups. With this you can either add a users name to your comment box or their little avatar, so that you don’t have to type the name when you are replying directly to someone.

Flickr AllSize+ – this script is pretty useful if you either post in a lot of groups or like to share your photos outside of flickr using your flickr photos. The magnifying glass will bring you to an intermediate screen including all the links to the different sizes of your photo – making it way faster to access them.

Flickr On Black Buttons – This script will add two buttons allowing you to show the photo on a black background instead of the standard white one of Flickr – a lot of them really pop on black.